Environment Agency

Delivering reliable digital data and information management for Environment Agency’s physical flood and coastal defence assets

Over the past 18 months 1Spatial have collaborated with Environment Agency (EA) to deliver reliable digital data and information management for EA’s physical flood and coastal defence assets.

The EA is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Responsible for protection and enhancement of the environment across England, it employs around 10,600 staff, organised into four directorates. Of these, Flood and Coastal Risk Management (FCRM) deals with approximately half the Agency’s annual expenditure to build, maintain and operate flood defences, and provide effective flood warnings to communities.

Data about its extensive flood and coastal defence assets, which are an essential part of the national infrastructure, is as important as the physical assets themselves. Robust asset information management is therefore required to be data driven and ensure that the Agency’s asset data is findable, accessible, interoperable, re-usable and fit for purpose.

Asset data supplied to EA as geoCOBie files needs to be assured against contractually defined standards at the point of delivery. EA, Defra and 1Spatial have implemented an automated service called Datastore, Rules and Visualisation (DRV), for extracting, assuring, and storing geoCOBie files. The digital service uses FME Server to extract geoCOBie files from EA’s Common Data Environment, 1Integrate to assure geoCOBie asset data and Azure SQL Database to store assured asset data.

The Environment Agency’s agile development aids rapid flood defence survey

The government has announced that military engineers would be deployed to assist the Environment Agency. 250 engineers from the navy, army, RAF and Royal Marines would conduct a “rapid inspection” of the nation’s 150,000 most critical flood defence assets to assess damage. These assets range from 15 – 20 kilometre long embankments to single sluice gates or outfalls. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond stated that, “we’re going to try and do in five weeks what would be about a two year programme of inspection.”

The Environment Agency uses VertiGIS Studio technology for web-GIS to help inform decisions

The Environment Agency selected VertiGIS Studio's technology, part of the VertiGIS Studio suite of products, as part of its Strategic Mapping Platform and next generation EasiMap application. 1Spatial, the UK and Ireland reseller for VertiGIS Studio, supplied VertiGIS Studio technology and helped the Environment Agency implement the EasiMap application. EasiMap will be available to 12,000 people around England through the Environment Agency. On average, over 3,000 people in the Environment Agency will log into the system via the internal intranet every day.